I'd say arty was the #1 reason for most of WoT's existence, but yeah, the reason I quit (and I think most veterans have been quitting for the past couple years) is WG's "balance"/MM. This game has some of the worst powercreep I've ever seen in an MMO. Can totally understand gehak's raging anti-arty boner, though.

Super congrats hibachi! We're so proud of you.
I don't like to talk about my life much, but things have been really rough on me for the past six months or so. Bad health, bad experiences, and losing my SO has made for a pretty rough year. I've gotten some things done that I've always wanted to, but there's one thing I haven't been able to do, and that's come out about my sexuality. I just can't work up the courage, especially knowing how some people dear to me would take it.
I have gotten to talk with Bun more often though, and I'm trying to make some new friends, so things aren't all bad. Still besties with @Zytyx, who is a precious bean, by the way!

Although I probably would have picked up Conan if they were similarly priced, 75% off Rust is hard to beat.
One of the best deals I've seen is 92% off Civ 5 Complete, from a standard price of $150 USD down to $12. Definitely would pick that up if you have any interest in the Civ series. Since I'm talking about strategy games already, Age of Empires II HD is $4, with the complete game/DLC bundle also being $12. Along with EU4, these three games are the best strategy games of their respective subgenres, IMHO. I can't recommending buying EU4 though, considering the bundle costs $101 on sale. If you want it, you might want to buy the base game and "find" the DLC.
Everspace also looks fun.

I don't believe there is another site for English high-level metagame discussion, so in that way, yes, wotlabs is still the thing. It's also very inactive though, so you'll find a lot more content crawling through reddit or the official forum than you will here. Usually not good content, but it's there. I wouldn't be surprised if the Russian community has something similar to wotlabs' forum, though.
Sadly the competitive aspect of the game has been actively subdued by wargaming, so there's little push for either more wotlabs content or a new site to share it on. Unless the game takes a 180 (and doesn't manage to die in the process), this is unlikely to change.

This tanks looks like they took the ugly hull design of the british tanks and combined it with the ugly turret design of american tanks. I'm half tempted to say it's a good safe sex advertisement, and half tempted to say it's adorable...

I dont think pubg is exactly known for its quality, but yea. If you take it slow, it's just AFK simulator with one fight after a half hour of waiting. If you take it fast, it's just an FPS with bad controls. It's still good fun if you're into these kinds of games, though; the weight and slow nature of the game gives a nice alternative to fortnight. It's just too bad it still feels like an early access game.

@Rexxie I've been working professionally as a developer for just over 11 years. I also do some coding on the side on whatever random thing takes my interest, although my personal projects have a habit of withering on the vine. Mostly I work in Python and Scala right now, in the past I've done a fair bit of ES5.1 and ES6 (JavaScript to humans), PHP (never again) and Java (also never again).

I got my start pretty early. When I was in primary school I found some books in the local library on programming in BASIC. They were really out of date at the time (they were for 80s computers like the Spectrum whereas this was the early 90s) and my family didn't own a computer, although a computer lab had just been created at school running machines with MS-DOS. Anyways, I got to learning BASIC and some friends and I spent hours writing out code for linear, choose-your-own-adventure text-based adventure games. When I say writing, I mean we literally wrote them down on paper :-) I think when we eventually got a chance to try them on the computers but I can't recall if any of them worked.

Later my family got a computer (initially borrowed from one of my Dad's co-workers but later we got one of our own) and around the same time we got dial-up internet. I was in secondary school at this point. I was already using Linux at this point as before we even got a PC at home I'd found out about it and ordered a 6-CD set that included a couple of distros (Slackware, Redhat 3.0.3 Picasso, some others I forget) and various contrib packages of applications. I think I was mad about Linux for a good year before I even got to run it :-)

Anyways, with the internet I somehow found out about C and downloaded a tutorial and taught myself C (compiling on Redhat 3.0.3 with GCC). Later I got a book on C++ (one of those terrible C++ for dummies books) and, in theory, learned C++ but honestly that book was pretty terrible.

By the time I got to varsity I was experienced enough (which is to say, not very in reality) that learning Java in first year was dead easy which in turned set me up for a habit of slacking that ultimately didn't help. At varsity we worked in Java (1st year) and C++ (2nd year on) for practical (which I usually did well in) while covering all the usual theory (data structures, complexity theory, etc) which I hated and tended to do poorly at in tests. In the end I didn't complete my degree and after spending 6 months in the UK looking for work (I only found shitty temp jobs outside of the field) came back to South Africa and returned to Cape Town a few months later.

Moved in with this girl (who's now my wife) and managed to get a Junior Java Developer job at a local company via a recommendation from a friend of hers and I haven't looked back since.

Started 4 years ago. Taught myself how to write a shitty C# application for work, wrote a thread here 6 months after that (worth reading if you want to know where to start), picked up "Head First Java" and now work on a distributed web service and dabble in app development while doing CS degree.